Ajit Nazre, Aniruddha Nazre, Ajit, Ajit Nazre Wellington Partners

Ajit Nazre grew the business significantly before it was acquired by SAP.In 2002,Ajit Nazre started SAP Inspire—SAPs New Venture Unit. Ajit Nazre did his schooling in St. Vincents High School and then graduated with a BE in Mechanical Engineering from COEP in 1986 where ajit nazre was the University Gold Medalist. Ajit Nazre MBA, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Boston, MA Ph.D. in Biomechanics, Hanover, Germany CSO & EVP Digital Media Services, Reliance Industries Ltd.

Friday, 30 October 2015

About AjitAniruddha Nazre joined Wellington Partners as a venture advisor in 2012. Ajit has been working as EVP and CSO at Reliance Industries Ltd.At Reliance, Ajit Nazre has been responsible for launching "Jio", a Telecom and Digital Media Services venture that can potentially connect 500M Indians to the internet by the end of 2016. Before joining Reliance he was a Senior Partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB) from 2003 to 2011.

Ajit Nazre focused on investments in enterprise software, new materials, and cleantech. He made 19 investments with 11 exits. He led KPCB's India investment initiative and also made 4 investments in Europe. Some of his successful exits at KPCB included LuxVue (acquired by Apple), 3DV (acquired by MSFT), Virsa (acquired by SAP), Vertica (acquired by HP) and InfoEdge (IPO in 2006). Prior to KPCB, he worked at SAP from 1998 to 2003.Aniruddha Nazre joined as a Technical Assistant to Dr. Hasso Plattner, CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of SAP. He played a key role in formulating and executing SAP's mySAP.com initiative. He co-founded SAPMarkets, SAP's e-commerce software company and as Managing Director at SAPMarkets Americas, he grew the business to $100 million in six quarters. After SAPMarkets was acquired by SAP in 2002, Ajit laid the foundation for SAP Inspire and served as the Senior Vice President. Prior to SAP,Ajit Nazre worked for six years in the medical device industry.From 1991 till 1995, he worked at Zimmer, Inc. as a Development Engineer and oversaw the introduction of three new product lines in two years. At Mathys AG (Synthes) in Switzerland, Ajit Nazre was a Group Manager for Business Development and Product Management from 1995 to 1997.

Ajit Nazre holds seven United States and four European patents and has published and presented over 15 articles in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. He holds a Ph.D. in Biomechanics from the Technical University of Hanover, Germany, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the Michigan Tech, an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School, and an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the College of Engineering Pune, India.

Wednesday, 2 September 2015

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around since the term was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy. AI is on its third life after the first one ending in the 70s when funding from US federal sources dried up and the second one ending after the crash of the LISP machine market. It appears that in its third reincarnation that started in the 90s, AI is here to stay for the long run. The field of AI has expanded to various fields as shown in the classification (chart 1).

Chart 1: Classification of AI

Thanks to advances in computing, networks, storage, big data, and neuroscience AI is getting more accurate in prediction. Its applications are ubiquitous in both consumer and industrial settings. We use it daily on our smart phone in the form of automatic word completion in the text editor and face recognition to log on. It is seen in toy drones, home help robots and self-parking cars. Industrial applications are common place from aerospace and agriculture to recruiting and wealth-management.

The US has become the hotbed of innovation in AI and has captured a leadership position in terms of university research, patents, startups funded, commercial and military use. In 2014, IBM and Microsoft had more patents granted in AI and ML in 2014 than all other tech companies (chart 2).

Chart 2: Patents Granted in 2014 by USPTO

Chart 3: Active AI Companies by Country 2015

In order to better understand which areas within AI are seeing most disruption we created a database of 2800 companies that are innovating in all the areas (as shown in chart 1)of AI and ML (machine learning). For the study, we also included areas that span multiple fields such as drones, image recognition, and augmented reality. We winnowed the 2800 companies down to 1781 active companies depending on whether they were acquired, closed down, or went bankrupt. More than half of the active 1781 companies are located in the US (chart 3).

We further narrowed the list of companies based on who had received funding. Only 18% (312 companies) of the 1781 active companies have funding >$100k.

Chart 4: Funded Companies by Location

Out of the 312 funded companies, nearly 40% are located in the San Francisco Bay area with more than 70% in North America (chart 4).

A vast majority of the funded companies are still pre series A, or in other words, in early stages of development (chart 5).

70% of AI and ML innovation is targeted toward enterprise applications (chart 9) across a wide range of industries from Aerospace to Wealth management (chart 10).Surprisingly, “AI / ML as a service” is the second most prevalent application area after industrial automation.

Chart 10: Funded Companies in AI / ML by Application Vertical

Acquisitions are also happening at a brisk pace and Google is the most acquisitive tech company in the space (21 acquisitions) followed by Facebook (10) and Apple (6) (chart 11).

Chart 11: Acquisition Activity in AI / ML

There is a lot of literature and press covering various uses of AI and ML. We have compiled a list of companies that we thought stood out in the following verticals:

Thursday, 26 March 2015

Ajit Nazrejoined Reliance in 2012. Prior to that Ajit Nazre was at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers from 2003 – 2012.Ajit Nazre’s areas of investment included enterprise software and services and material science.Before joining KPCB, Ajit Nazre was with SAP for 5 years. At SAP, Ajit nazre worked for Dr.Hasso Plattner, CEO, Chairman and cofounder, SAP. Ajit Nazre played a key role in formulating and executing SAP’s internet strategy (mySAP.com). Ajit Nazre co-founded SAPMarkets, a fully owned company of SAP, focused on Market place applications and technology. As the Managing Director of SAPMarkets Americas, Ajit Nazre grew the business significantly before it was acquired by SAP. In 2002, nazre started SAP Inspire—SAP’s New Venture Unit.Prior to SAP, worked for six years in the medical device industry, first at Zimmer, Inc.,a division of Bristol Myers and Squibb and then at Mathys AG (Synthes) in Switzerland. During this time Ajit Nazre managed the development in several new product lines and received 7 U.S.and four European patents.

Originally from Pune, Ajit Nazre did his schooling in St. Vincent’s High School and then graduated with a BE in Mechanical Engineering from COEP in 1986 where Ajit Nazre was the University Gold Medalist. After completing his MS degree in Biomechanics from Michigan Technological University, Ajit Nazre completed his Doctorate in Biomechanics from the Hannover Medical Center in Germany. After a few years of working in engineering, product management and business development Ajit Nazre completed his MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Automated test tools and services in the cloud are making it ever easier to test code before deployment.

Cloud security and identity services have made it easier for enterprise applications to work on public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

A new class of Reactive Applications is becoming more and more prevalent in both Consumer and Enterprise-facing environments. Reactive Applications are distinguished by having one or more of the following defining traits:

Resilient: The ability to recover and repair itself automatically in order to provide seamless business continuity.

Interactive: Rich, engaging, single page user interfaces that provide instant feedback based on user interactions and other stimuli.

Scalable: Can scale within and across nodes elastically to provide compute power on-demand when it’s needed.